[lucasjung]

I recently tried to set up an HTPC with XBMC on top of Arch. I had never used Arch before, but I was attracted by the idea of being able to install just the very minimum stuff I needed (to keep boot times short), as well as the rolling-release system (to avoid the headache of "upgrading" to a new release).

Unfortunately, I never made it very far because of KMS (which gp mentioned). I'm using intel graphics (Core i3-2100T), and the drivers didn't play nice with KMS: my screen would go blank at a certain point during boot. The system would still boot up: I could log in and execute shutdown commands, all in the blind. It turns out this is a known bug[1], and the only solution is to turn KMS off. Unfortunately, when I turned KMS off (either explicitly in the conf files or by downgrading to an older kernel that doesn't support it), X wouldn't start, citing lack of KMS as the reason! So, I was stuck with a situation where my screen broke if I used KMS, but X wouldn't work if I didn't. After failing to find help on the Arch forums, I ditched Arch for my HTPC and went with xubuntu. At first I was afraid that the same kernel bug would affect me regardless of distro, but apparently ubuntu builds their kernel differently in some key way that lets it work.

All that being said, I enjoyed playing with Arch so much that I'm probably going to install it on my laptop after I finish setting up the HTPC (the laptop has nvidia graphics, so I shouldn't have the same problem). I've been using Linux since the late '90s, starting with slackware and changing distros every few years, but I've become a bit of a GUI-cripple in the last few years. Installing and configuring Arch knocked a lot of rust off. It felt good to once again really understand all of the various settings and the config files that held them.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel#KMS_.28Kernel_Mod... (scroll down to the note just above "See Also")